Exploding Six Pack

Big Dog and I were talking the other day about J1. It’s been a long while since I heard anything about that fool. When J1 left Team Loser to go work in the R&D lab for The Drunk, I was happy. It meant I wouldn’t have to see or hear his stupidity anymore. Big Dog told me J1 just royally screwed up again back in the E-Lab. I’m not at all surprised.

Recently J1 has been working in the Environmental Lab doing temperature testing on a new instrument. We do temperature testing on prototype and initial production boxes to help flush out unforseen problems and set performance specifications. By subjecting raw units to repeated extremes of cold and heat, we can simulate the aging process. Make them suddenly six months to a year old and see what kinds of failures pop up, if any. Maybe there’s a trend to a particular failure mode and after investigating it the engineering department may find a serious design flaw. Obviously it’s desired to find these kinds of problems before we release a new product line for purchase. The other important goal is setting the specification and performance limits. Temperature testing allows us to find the absolute extreme edge the instrument can operate at. It’s a critical part of launching a new product. If we provide a customer with tighter specifications or better performance than a competitor’s equivalent box, we can more than likely command the market.

Depending on the kinds of testing we’re doing in the chambers, boxes can take many hours if not days to complete. At each temperature the environmental chamber is set to, it has to flood the inside with super chilled air or super heated air. If we want testing to be completed at 0C the chamber will have to ramp down and then soak for a minimum of an hour at 0C before any testing can begin. J1 sometimes likes to take advantage of the cold cycle in the chambers by storing his food or drinks in there along with powered up instruments. He treats chambers as if they were his personal luxury refrigerators. It’s stupid, we’ve got plenty of refrigerators on every floor of each building for grub but that’s not good enough for J1.

The other night J1 decided to stash a six pack of Coca Cola in one of the chambers while it was soaking at 0C, and he apparently forgot about them. At the end of his shift he went home empty-headed as usual without thinking twice about his sodas. Hours later the chamber completed required testing and automatically ramped up to 55C beginning a new temperature soak for an hour. It probably didn’t take long after reaching 55C that J1’s cans of soda exploded, spraying liquid all over the inside of the chamber dousing four live instruments. Coke seeping inside the unit’s cases shorted out multiple circuitboards which ruined them.

We sell our products in a variety of option mixes. The more options a customer buys, the more capable the unit is. Of course more options also means a considerably higher retail cost. I don’t know what the specific option mixes on these four boxes were but let’s say they were mid-range capable. That would place them in the $20,000 bracket. The grand total of destruction caused by J1’s incompetence for this incident is therefore estimated to be $80,000 give or take ten grand.

Lab managers had no choice but to investigate how this happened and find out who was responsible, but nobody finked on J1. Unable to find who the culprit was, they quickly gave up and just took the loss. People who knew that J1 was at fault should have spoke up about it. I mean, I know people don’t want to be seen as the bad guy or get involved in stuff like this but come on. J1 is a total asshat that nobody likes anyway and this was a perfect opportunity to finally get him out of here. Since nobody stepped up to the plate and ratted him out he’s going to be able to fuck up more shit. It’s not a question of if J1 wrecks shit, it’s simply a matter of when.